


The Human Emotion

by orphan_account



Series: The Human Emotion [1]
Category: Warcraft (2016)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Fluff, I'm a nerd, Interstellar travel, M/M, The Future, relativity theory, space, space troopers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 12:46:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7715383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is kindness, and sometimes Lothar suspects a sense of humour in the program. </p><p>They did an excellent job on the AI.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Human Emotion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mia826](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mia826/gifts).



> Thanks to the lovely mia826 for proofreading! 
> 
> You're probably feeling much better already, but I promised to gift this to you as a get well gift, so here you go <3 Maybe you can store it for the next time, if the universe allows it.

The first thing to welcome him back to consciousness is the vastness of space.

Lothar stretches his limbs and tries to open his eyes. By how broken he feels, he must have been asleep for months, if not longer. The last four interplanetary flights have not been kind on him. The capsule in which he woke is comfortable for now, the freezing liquid almost warm to the touch. That, that is always the most dreadful part. It won't remain pleasant. It starts with pinpricks and it ends with him feeling like his arms are about to fall off and the heartbeat in his chest is going to stop from shock.

The process that guides him through his rehabilitation is fully regulated. It is as safe as it can be. No human touch will bring up unnecessary variables. Machines whir and raise the temperature of the fluid, while the shutters of the ship's windows draw up and reveal the vessel's destination.

The Geneva Station.

Radio static crackles. “Commander Lothar? Sir? How are you feeling?”

Lothar winces at the beginnings of the tingling sensation. “Defrosting. Couldn't be better. What is the date?”

“Ah, welcome back, Sir.” As opposed to last time Lothar heard that voice, the response is now nearly instantaneous. There is kindness, and sometimes he suspects a sense of humour in the program. They did an excellent job on the AI. Even his voice sounds older now. As if a program can age. “Today is the sixth of September. 2440, Sir.”

So he has lost another one fifty odd years in the last ferry. Did his grandson get grandchildren, Lothar wonders? Has his line been continued? “How long was I in for?” he asks.

“You have been asleep for three months and two days,” says the voice over the static. “Surely I don't have to ask you if you are well rested.”

Three months and two days; which is half a century on Earth. Lothar is so far from his home planet that the return trip alone will chip another two hundred out of the history of his home planet for him. Of all the laws in the universe, relativity is his least favourite.

But Lothar won't be going home. To return is to find the future having caught up with him. He will find his family passed away—from old age if he is lucky—and a life in which his very self is archaic. Lothar closes his eyes and waits for his body to adjust for the final descent. The station itself is a miracle of science, with lush green forests and densely populated cities, as it orbits a lesser sun at the right distance to resemble Earth in all but the days being twice as short. The Geneva Station is nearly the size of a small planet—and Lothar vaguely wonders where they got the materials to build such a marvel. At not even forty, the station is going to be his retirement plan.

Being one of the last men from Earth to take up service without enhancements, Lothar doesn't know what to he can expect. The thing he remembers most from the last station he has been to were the blue-skinned underwater people. Not a different race but human, like him. And then there were the men with the glowing eyes. Nobody batted an eye.

The people might be the biggest factor to get used to.

“Talk to me, Khadgar,” he says as he tries to ignore the pain that is coming out of cryostasis. “What has happened while I was away?”

And Khadgar talks. With a perfectly simulated lightness of youth, he tells Lothar of the end of the war. He tells Lothar about his old friend, Wrynn, who led the troops at one of the decisive battles—Lothar doesn't want to know how long ago that might have been, or how many light years away that is. Khadgar talks about anything and nothing. Unlike the other programs, which would have simply given him a chronological rundown, listening to Khadgar is like listening to a friend.

“You should be ready in a few hours,” says Khadgar. “I have arranged the best decontamination quarters for you.” Which sounds oddly welcoming, compared to the single capsule and the yawning void that is cold, hostile space just outside the windows. “You have dedicated your life to mankind, so it's the least I can do. You will like Geneva.”

Lothar grunts. Geneva is really his only viable option. “Are there any places you can recommend?”

Now Khadgar laughs. His program is perfect, Lothar thinks, for a man in need of company. “There is a village. Goldshire, we called it, because the trees appear to be on fire when the sun sets. It is a popular tourist spot, honestly, but I like it.”

Pain is flaring up hot and intrusive through his veins by now. Lothar is close to passing out. It is not a shame to do so, although he wants to at least have made the voyage once without doing so. “You like it, huh?” he snorts. “Aren't you a voice in a box, Khadgar?”

“You keep insisting that,” mutters back the voice.

Lothar sighs. “Because you are.”

“Keep in mind that this voice in a box is going to help you through your first steps of naturalisation. Or not. Really, are all men from Earth so rude?”

“You tell me.”

Khadgar huffs. As always, his programming makes him painfully honest. “Well, you're the worst.”

It puts them back on familiar terrain. Khadgar's indignation has been a welcome companion to Lothar's months preceding his cryosleep; months in which he has been otherwise alone. The others in his squad have all been assigned other missions. Lonely and bored, Lothar's greatest entertainment has been the upgrade to the newest AI to talk him through his last months of active service. And Khadgar's program is far superior over the others. Whoever decided to incorporate a character in him deserves praise. It is his humanity that has kept Lothar sane.

“So Goldshire,” he says. “What do you like best about Goldshire?”

“Spring,” replies Khadgar's static voice. “Spring is so magical. I've been there many times.”

Lothar smiles and shakes his head. His eyes drift shut. “I'm going to miss you, kid.”

“That's the nicest thing a soldier has said to me, old man.”

Lothar wheezes when he snorts hard at the nickname and swallows fluid.

Might Khadgar take it the wrong way if he asks for a copy of his program? Would that be morally questionable, Lothar wonders.

He thinks he'd like to hear him again.

* * *

Of course, the elysium that is the Geneva Station—or Geneva, as everyone unofficially calls it; sometimes it is just _G_ , but Lothar feels too old for that—is off access for weeks. He spends three weeks decontaminating in one of the Anthropic Space Program terminals in orbit, the ASP's familiar logo of an open eye printed on the ceramic plates, on the clothes he wears and on every door he passes. Any bacteria that might disturb the local ecosystem are purged, and Lothar did not expect that to make him as nauseous as it did. Apparently a lot about his own biology is now outdated.

He reads about history and he practices sword to kill the time, preferably barefoot; the only shoes he can find are terribly clunky. The books give him a headache and the sword training he considers pointless for modern-day warfare, but it gives him peace to not have to rely on his ionising gun to vaporise his enemy, negating a lifeform's existence with just a press of a button.

After those initial weeks, he is admitted to the program that will get him acquainted with local customs, local gravity and local everything else.

“How did you do?” pipes up Khadgar's voice on the first night in his new quarters. “Ready to go down and see what I've arranged for your home soon?”

Lothar is too exhausted from using muscle that has not been tested for the duration of his long sleep to comment on Khadgar, kind but snarky AI Khadgar, whose interest in his general welfare is a first. “I thought I was supposed to see a realtor for that.”

“If that's what you want,” says Khadgar. “No realtor would ever offer you this house, I'll tell you that. It's old, see. It doesn't have climate control or a board computer. It is very colonial Earth. Incredibly old-fashioned. It sounded like something for you.”

“Kid, just because you don't have to wait for my response for hours doesn't mean you can get cocky with me.” But Lothar is smiling. He quite likes the instant feedback, just as Khadgar's program, sad as it is to be friends with a piece of software, is the only reprieve in this place that he can find. Given, two human instructors have been assigned to his rehabilitation, but although they speak English, he can't understand half of what they say.

“Want me to get rid of the house, Sir?” asks Khadgar.

Lothar shakes his head. “Not until after I've seen it.”

Something proud creeps into the static. “Very well, Sir.”

“Kid?”

“Hm?”

“Call me Lothar, okay?”

To strike up a friendship with the only comprehensible voice in his life, Lothar may or may not be dooming himself.

* * *

Lothar is flown down from orbit after too many weeks. His rehabilitation, he counts, has taken longer than the journey itself, but he is at least a bit proficient with the local dialect and the customs. For all that Geneva's society is purely human—mankind never having quite successfully managed to mingle with any of the other intelligent lifeforms it has come across during the galactic expansion of its people, it is too much an alien world to feel at home.

He wonders how his first debriefing is going to go. Considering that Khadgar is a concept, a neutral network commissioned by the ASP and then allowed to grow in the realm of bytes, it might just be that; a voice in an empty room bidding him goodbye and good luck with his endeavours during the rest of his life. Perhaps an offer that if he ever needs something, he will know where to find him.

But Lothar doesn't know how to find him, short of going back into space. And he has been out there long enough for a lifetime.

His expectations are not wrong, except Khadgar does not offer him anything of the sort. He is very formal, more so than ever. When he acquits Lothar over the speaker, Lothar is left with the feeling that he talked to a different program altogether. Khadgar's voice it may be, but anything else that once sounded alive has been stripped from him.

Khadgar has read him a script. A secretary registered his responses on a barely corporeal keyboard in a corner of the room, his ears too long and his eyes that same unsettling glow like the trend that Lothar had hoped would have passed. And that is it.

When he leaves the room and is transported to the home that his controller for the last year has picked for him, Lothar feels like he has lost something.

* * *

Days and nights go fast on Geneva; if Lothar sleeps in, it costs him half a day. More foreign is that the world is asleep when he does. Society, especially the younger half, has gotten used to living during the night. There is a thriving business in melatonin supplements to keep people asleep during day, if they are not already neurally enhanced to produce the hormone under light.

Lothar gives up after a month of waking up to the dark. He has seen enough black for a lifetime, he thinks, and he quite likes how silent the world becomes during day, when everyone else is asleep.

He visits Goldshire when his loneliness becomes too great, and he understands why Khadgar likes it so—or why he has claimed to. The program must have quoted a tourist leaflet, but the fact remains that it is lovely. The trees are perpetually red as if autumn on Earth, and when it is just Lothar and not the throng of people who come out at night, he quite enjoys spending days in the village.

Without purpose, Lothar volunteers at the stables close to his outdated, colonial, _normal_ home. He expects to find horses, not the hybrids they call gryphons; chimera monstrosities with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Fierce creatures, but unsuspectingly loyal.

The first time he rides one, Lothar laughs until he cries.

The first time he flies it, he aches for someone to share it with.

* * *

Lothar has too much time on his hands and lacks the restfulness to sleep even at night. And so he finds himself the only pub that he knows serves a vintage ale, and he visits the Gilded Rose every two nights.

The hour is approaching the time when he ought to go home and at least try to get some sleep, sixty days and sixty nights from his descent to Geneva, when he catches sight of a man watching him.

At first he thinks the stranger looks because Lothar clearly sticks out. Amongst the people donning gills or rabbit's ears, Lothar is an odd outcast without any work done on his appearance. He is undoubtedly one of the younger people in this bar when it comes to age, and yet the only one whose face betrays how many years he has relatively lived. But the man watching him seems to lack cosmetic changes just the same. His hair is dark and natural, his lashes thick without making him effeminate.

He is beautiful.

So Lothar, who has not made contact with many since he left Earth behind, allows the man to look. He reciprocates with a raise of his glass, and sits there until night turns into day, enjoying his ale while keeping track of the stranger who disappears and then returns, over and over, like he is afraid that staring for too long might be considered offensive.

Lothar wishes the man would come up and introduce himself. If the stranger is something not, it is forward.

By the end of the night, when his observer has once again disappeared, he gets up and saunters back home disappointed. His path is curved by inebriation as it is broken by pauses. But no matter how many times Lothar stops to look over his shoulder, he never sees the man follow.

The Gilded Rose becomes a habit from that point on. Lothar will visit and wait for the stranger. For days that border on weeks, he has only himself to keep him company. But Lothar has the time and the money—a couple of centuries in the military without being able to spend anything he amassed has done that for him—and he feels given a purpose.

The third week, the stranger sits down next to him and all is finally well. Until the man leans in and admits, boyishly amused, “I expected you to be older.”

Mid twenty-first century English. How long has it been since he heard anyone use that?

It is only now that Lothar sees the glowing fingertips; the way the boy's eyes light up a little unnaturally from certain angles, and that there is a seal resembling the ASP logo marring the smooth skin on his lower arm. Not wholly unmodified, then, but no less beautiful up close, to the point that his presence borders on the surreal. Pure.

“Who are you?” asks Lothar. He himself is a fossil from Earth, with scars on his skin and his manners too coarse for someone delicate like this company. So is everyone else in this pub. They all want this creature's attention, and Lothar is far from the most worthy to receive it. “And what are you doing in this place?”

The man smiles. He lowers his head. With a gesture, he orders a glass of the most expensive water. “Lothar,” he laughs, young and bright, “you know me.”

But he sounds so familiar. And how did he come across Lothar's name? Has he read it somewhere? Is he here for something other than to be acquainted? Lothar waves his hand. “Clear up my memory.”

“You called me a voice in a box,” mentions the man casually.

It clicks then. Lothar forgets his drink and his manners, and literally looks the stranger up and down. He is flesh and blood, he establishes with reasonable certainty, and quite lovely flesh at that. His lips are plump, his frame perfect without being so by design. His eyes blink like any man's, and his pupils are wet like they ought to be.

“Clearly I was wrong.” Lothar does not bother to hide his astonishment. “Khadgar.”

“Hello, old man.”

“Not that old, boy.”

The boy raises his brow. “Three hundred and thirty-eight. Older than all of my predecessors.” He folds his hands and presses a finger against the curved glass. The glass glosses over, the water barely still liquid, before he brings it to his lips and drinks.

The question is perhaps not who this man is, but rather what.

The one that inherently follows is, does Lothar care?

They share stories for the rest of the night. Rather, Lothar talks and Khadgar listens. There is so much to tell. Lothar speaks about the gryphon he got to train, and how he tries to get adjusted to this cosmopolitan life where nobody cares about anything other than their appearance. But he also tells about the nice things, few as they are.

He talks of the war, but he glosses over the deaths he has seen. Certainly Khadgar would not care much for human death. Lothar talks of all the things he has started writing down, so that people may one day read it and understand the foundation of their society.

And Khadgar takes it all in. For what he is or may be, it is hard to think of him as something inhuman. He seems so very eager to hear everything.

This, this is the company Lothar has yearned for.

It comes to an end too soon.

“I'm leaving for space for a year tomorrow.”

The words hammer into Lothar like a hydraulic Mark III battering ram. For a moment he feels like he is back in his capsule, ready to leave Saturn for his first jump. That was so many years ago. That fear, the idea that any defect in the equipment, no matter how small, could kill him in under a second when approximating the speed of light. It is still so vivid. “So you are here to say goodbye?”

Khadgar shrugs. “I'm here because I wanted to see you.”

“Will you jump?”

There the man screws up his nose. “No. Of course not.” And that is a relief. “I'll just be in the terminal, accompanying one of the new arrivals. They'll have me waiting for hours for an answer, as you know how that goes. Boring work.” He leans his chin on his palm and twirls the glass of water. “I liked talking to you though.”

“What is it you're saying, boy?” asks Lothar.

“Asking,” says Khadgar. “If I can call you when I'm up there. The terminal is so quiet. There is all this knowledge that I'm supposed to be studying if I want to be better, but it's so—so _tedious_.”

That makes Lothar snort. As if listening to a veteran is not. The boy who is not a boy would have to only snap his fingers and have someone to talk to at all times on ten channels. That many people have lingered in the Gilded Rose to envy Lothar's position.

He does not agree because he thinks Khadgar needs it. In the end Lothar says yes for wholly selfish reasons.

* * *

“So how old are you really, kid?”

Khadgar's voice over the radio takes a minute to respond in his familiar gain. Like it is a trick question. “You've got a million questions to ask and you ask me my age? Nothing about how I was born, or raised, or where I see myself in five years? Political views? Opinion on the death penalty? Have I smoked weed?”

Lothar talks to an artificial intelligence that longs to communicate; when the question is thrown back over the fence, Lothar realises how asking the product of centuries of scientific advancement for his age may be shallow. “Let's start off light,” he says.

Khadgar grunts. “Twenty-four.”

“Not just your physics.”

" _Twenty-four_. What, you think I was just transferred into my body at some point?"

And Lothar honestly does not know. He saves that question for later. “Thirty-seven,” he says.

Khadgar laughs. “I didn't ask.”

“But now you know.”

They have been talking for days. It is not actually as long as that, because Khadgar has a job to do and the soldier he is assisting on his first entry into Geneva, he tells, is nervous. He is just exiting the jump. His client—for that is what Khadgar calls him, which leaves Lothar to wonder if he has called Lothar his client too—has never made a jump before.

On the first days, they sneak in conversations about everyday life and stories about the past. Ultimately, they find a routine. Sometimes Khadgar asks how his day went and Lothar tells him about his new position as a commander, or the gryphon chick who acts around him like he is her mother. But as soon as they breach the topic, neither of them can get enough of discovering each other's points of view.

Acceptable answers on ethical matters, Lothar finds out, are not so different between a man and a human hybrid. Where they change are where Khadgar does not mind asking the really hard questions. He asks flat out why men used to bury their dead; why Lothar has killed in the line of duty but always had trouble disintegrating someone; why the life of a human being is objectively considered more worthy than that of any lifeform with a similarly long history and capacity of intelligence.

He asks why people think robots do not live, and why it upsets them when they claim to love.

Khadgar is alive, Lothar argues. Not because he senses Khadgar's personal investment in the answer—and oh, he knows there has to be—but because he genuinely believes that all things that eventually die will have inherently had to at some point also live. As a man who is a mix of everything from living tissue to improved long term memory and a bionic spine that connects biological synapses; who can plug himself into a computer and store his thoughts much like he would in a diary by downloading the data from his temporal lobe, Khadgar is more than the science that shaped him.

But a better answer would be that he is becoming dear to Lothar.

* * *

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Lothar asks from the hammock in the forest where he camps with his regiment on a field exercise. He has a phone plugged into his ear and he is getting the hang of these self-flotational units suspending his hammock from what appears to be thin air.

The question has been bothering him all day.

Is Khadgar awake, he wonders? Is he listening? Lothar is on the other side of Geneva, caught in the middle of night where Khadgar's terminal is forever stuck in daylight.

Hearing the voice puts his world at peace. “You ask me nothing but personal questions, Commander. Don't stop now.”

None of Lothar's men are still awake, but Lothar types out his question regardless. _Can you have children?_

As soon as he sends it, he curses himself. It is too personal, too personal by far. He would have had his answer if he'd asked Khadgar about him having a viable genome. Except that sounds so clinical.

“Oh.” Khadgar audibly struggles. Would it be too late to take the question back? “Ah, I don't know? It doesn't really matter, I suppose, because I am never going to father any?”

“You don't want them?” Lothar asks now. “Or is it—”

He nearly asks the stupidest question he can think of.

It turns out he does not need to finish his sentence for Khadgar to read it loud and clear.

_Or is it that you can't?_

“…I have to get back to work. Good night, Lothar.”

For the first time, Lothar has hurt the voice in the machine. The connection is broken, and something in his chest sinks.

Lothar finishes the exercises with his mind only half in it.

He suffers bruises in the shooting practice, and several wounds that would have killed him in earnest combat. It is good that the war is over, and that he is only here for peacekeeping, because he is losing his touch. When he returns to the city, Lothar spends a day in the infirmary to be patched up. The machines and their capacity to heal something as trivial as a human being's bruises are a miracle. They ought to take up all his attention. But Lothar can't stop thinking about the boy.

Considering that all of his virtual apologies are deleted before they are read or heard, Lothar does not expect Khadgar to want to hear from him for some time. So when he lies in bed that night and the radio channel comes back online, it is a surprise.

“Lothar?” asks Khadgar's voice. He is not as cheerful as he usually is. “Are you there?”

Lothar unmutes his mic. “What is it, kid?”

“Hi,” breathes out the boy. “It's good to hear you. I, er—sorry. Are you angry with me?”

The idea itself is offensive. “Why would I be angry with you?”

“I don't know, I…I don't know why I did that. I hung up on you. It was irrational and it makes no sense, and I can't explain how or why I acted the way I did.” By the searching tone in his voice, Lothar gathers that such a loss of control over his emotions has not happened before. “Do you still want your answer?”

“Forget it,” says Lothar, who is glad enough to have the boy back. “It should be me apologising. What I asked was out of order.” His need to sleep is gone, and he spends the next minutes simply listening to Khadgar talking about the man he assists in his entry into the Geneva Station, soothing all of Lothar's aches that the machine has not been able to heal.

Khadgar is more timid though, Lothar notices. The boy mentions that he is breaking protocol contacting Lothar now, when they have specifically forbidden him from talking to anyone outside the terminal during work hours. But, he also adds, there aren't exactly times when he is off work, so he reasons that he will have an improvised break any time he wants to call.

“What if I contact you?” Lothar asks.

“That'd be breaking the rules,” chuckles Khadgar. By his voice, Lothar knows that Khadgar wants him to. “I should go now. I'm glad,” he hums, “I'm glad I could talk to you. I won't lose control like that again.”

The connection breaks, and Lothar is left alone in the dark of the room. It takes him several minutes to switch off the mic on his end. Sleep does not return to him that night.

Something about the exchange is bothering him.

* * *

“I can't talk right now.”

Lothar has taken the trouble of purchasing a ear piece. He has learned how to use the strange piece of technology hooked invisibly into his ear canal—transmitter, receiver and battery stuffed into something microscopically small—and he wants to share with his friend how he is learning new things in this alien world, when he is cut short.

“Are you busy?” he asks, disappointed. Khadgar actually has a job, and Lothar knows that wanting his attention is being unfair.

Khadgar snorts. “I am being monitored.”

With years of experience in the army, Lothar nods and breaks off the connection. Anything he says can be used against them. But what he doesn't understand is why.

It takes both of them sneaking around to get their hands on a secure channel. In the wee hour before dawn, when work in the terminal is at a minimum, Khadgar breaks the static. Lothar can practically hear the smile. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Lothar does not hide the fact that he is glad to hear him. The moments they talk are moments Lothar has started to live for. “Can we talk freely?”

“As freely as it gets.”

But Khadgar sounds fatigued. And, done with the things they are both not telling each other, Lothar wastes no effort on tact. “So what is going on?”

The radio is functional and the signal good. So the suppressed whimper that Lothar hears is not a trick of technology. “Nothing is going on,” lies Khadgar. “It's just, it's very tiring work right now. My client is going through rehabilitation and I get maybe two hours of sleep every night. I never said it was easy.”

Two hours is not nearly enough. Over extended periods of time, it is even against regulations. “But they pay you overtime, right? Or do you get extra hours off after this is over?”

Here Khadgar laughs. “Lothar. Lothar, you're a wonderful man and I love talking to you, but you don't know much about how this works. Enough about my work, okay? How was your day? Talk to me, tell me about what you've done. You wanted to tell me something last time?”

The invisible microphone in his ear now feels trivial. Lothar is no fool. “Kid, how does it work?”

“The way it does,” Khadgar counters.

“And I don't know how that is.”

Some switches and buttons are checked. Khadgar's mic sends a number of small machinery clicks through the ether, before a faintly wet sound. A habit of his, Lothar interprets it as the boy licking his lips. When the answer comes, it is secure and it is pained. “They made me.”

“So?”

“So?” Khadgar laughs sadly. “So, they own me. If it were up to me, I wouldn't be stuck in this place waiting for someone to need assistance. Why would I want that? I'd visit the libraries, and I'd learn about history and philosophy and ethics. I'd study biology and all its aspects. But they made me. And I've been distracted lately. So they monitor me, and they force me through corrections,” his voice has picked up bitterness, “and what I want is not a matter they concern themselves with. If they hear me tell you this, I'll be in a lot of trouble.”

Silence reigns between them. Lothar is at a loss for words. He wants to say something, anything to make Khadgar feel better. The boy may be engineered and he may have been the most expensive AI program they have endeavoured so far; Khadgar may not be fully biological. All the same, he is a human being with human feelings. He is not property. And Lothar wants to take him away from them.

“Pretend you're fine,” he hisses through his anger at the company that once employed him and that, at the end of his service, brought him here to this strange place to stumble upon the most curious of creatures. “I don't know why they would want to correct anything about you, but pretend, so they won't. We can talk less if that helps, or more. Whatever you need.”

What he hears on the other side of the line stills him.

Khadgar's voice breaks. “More. It doesn't feel like I am fine. I…”

He hesitates.

And the connection is terminated, leaving Lothar by himself once again.

* * *

For a week, Khadgar stays off the phone.

Lothar finds a distraction in his work. His soldiers are finally showing him some respect not based on something as invaliant as having made twelve jumps between stations or planets in his life, where he has puked up acid on an empty stomach and fainted at being defrosted every single time.

He does not contact Khadgar because he fears getting him into trouble. But Lothar misses the companionship even when he gains friends in the barracks and picks up some practice for the local tongue from an old lady at the stables who is delighted to help him if he teaches her some of his own deviant English. They are all fine, but they are not the person he really wants to talk to.

It is a Friday when Khadgar comes back to him on the secure connection and admits that he is in bed, and sleepy, but that he doesn't want to sleep before having talked.

“Did they do something?” Lothar is up at once.

“No,” hums Khadgar pleasantly, like all is right with the world. “They are good. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“You're—”

“They did as you said. They stopped the regulations, and it is only three more weeks until I am out of space.”

He sounds happy, but without the unbridled enthusiasm that used to be so characteristic of him before. Lothar finds it more subtle now, in the undertone of his voice when he whispers. Like Khadgar could just lie there and if both of them would not say a word, he would still be content.

“Have you flown a gryphon before?” Lothar asks before he knows what he is doing.

He earns himself a laugh. “Me? The ASP would never allow me on a bird. I'm too valuable for that.”

“But do you want to?”

Somewhere in a terminal floating above the Geneva Station, Lothar imagines Khadgar closing his eyes. He has not seen him for eight months, which is eight months too many. “Very much.” There is a ticking sound, like Khadgar bites his nails. “Lothar?”

“Hm?”

“…Nothing.” Whatever he means to ask, it makes Khadgar nervous enough to chicken out with a small laugh. Tension coils in Lothar's chest, and they share a strange and new nervousness over the static. “I've been reading—” He rephrases, “There's this book that mentions—” Finally he groans and bites the bullet. “You're human. How do you know when you like someone?”

That one sentence brings about a monumental change in Lothar. If calling him _boy_ sufficed before, Khadgar is growing every day, turning from a beautiful creature into a young man; someone with fears and doubts. Someone who cares about interpersonal relationships.

“I've been reading about human biology,” Khadgar explains himself when the silence stretches on, “and I think I understand most of it. But there is this chapter about reproduction and the like, and it just, I can't make sense of it. It seems to be intentionally vague.” It is rather, Lothar thinks, written in metaphors and implications that any human would understand but an intelligence that was never acknowledged as being more than a product of science could only grasp at. That does not answer why Khadgar is interested in the subject. “What does it say?” he asks with trepidation.

“‘When a man and a woman like each other',” says Khadgar.

“Just that?”

“It's an old publication. I wanted to read something from your time, because I'd—” He mumbles the rest of his sentence. “The modern publications would be clearer, I suppose. Maybe I should read one of those and not bother you with questions like these.”

“It's when you want to be with someone,” Lothar says.

“That doesn't explain it.”

Lothar has underestimated how easily the subject confuses. “It's not something you can explain,” he tries. “It is a gut feeling. When you think about someone all the time, and you want to see that person, make her happy. Or him.”

“The book says—”

“The book is not telling you a lot of things.”

Sheets shift around Khadgar. He is settling in, his voice curious, but careful, like he is on his guard. “You've been in love?”

Centuries left behind him catch up with Lothar. “A few times,” he admits. “A long time ago. The last time I loved someone, she became my wife. She gave me a son, and I loved both of them dearly.”

“But not in the same way?”

“No. Not in the same way,” says Lothar with a smile. “When you love someone the way you mean, it is physical. Or it was for me. You want to kiss that person, and if you're lucky, that person wants to kiss you back. You don't want to kiss just anyone.”

“Only when two people like each other,” Khadgar gathers. “I've never kissed someone.”

The familiar feeling returns to Lothar's gut. Is Khadgar aware of how they are crossing boundaries? He is unwilling to assume that the man really does not know, when he is mature and made of flesh and blood. “Would you like to?”

“I don't know.” And Lothar imagines him touching his lips absently. Maybe he slips one in and darts out his tongue to see how that feels; Lothar has to suppress what that thought does to him. Khadgar sighs out a loaded breath. “Maybe?”

“Hm,” breathes Lothar. He settles onto his back and closes his eyes. In his thoughts, he pictures Khadgar in the room with him. “It's not something you learn from books.”

“I suppose.”

“And you'd have to find someone you really like.”

Khadgar's voice sounds sleepier. “I don't think that's a problem.”

It is a scary thought to think that that could be anyone. The soldier who has just arrived at the terminal, or perhaps one of the people at the Gilded Rose—Khadgar could have gone there for years before finally finding Lothar's company amidst the crowd of anonymous individualists. But Lothar finds a strange fascination in laying out the different kisses to the man whose reference material is never going to cover specifics like these. Lothar never goes into detail. He sticks to just enough to make him curious.

Khadgar must have access to an entire archive from the century from whence he comes, and Lothar doesn't want him delving into any of that. He doesn't want to think about the ASP discovering that Khadgar wants to grow beyond the scope of what they have made him for.

By the time Khadgar announces that he is really pushing his time, he sounds heavier. Raspy. And when the connection ends, Lothar is not faring much better.

* * *

The day Khadgar is scheduled to return to Geneva, Lothar takes the day off and waits for him in the Gilded Rose. He has been looking forward to this moment for months. Lothar doesn't want to go as far as to say that it is nervousness that makes him glance at the clock every five minutes. Sometimes, it really is closer to two.

He could have known things would not be that easy.

Khadgar has been acting strange. They have not talked about the topic again, but their conversations have become stilted. And then Khadgar has not made an appearance for all of last week.

When they mentioned meeting up before, it has always been the Gilded Rose. The shuttle touches down, but Khadgar never makes it there.

Lothar rings him the next night, when there is still no sign of life. The static lasts and lasts. Eventually Lothar shuts it down and stares at the wall.

Perhaps something is wrong. Who can he talk to, though? To mention his concern to the ASP is to confirm that Khadgar has found someone who worries enough about him to inquire after him; it doesn't take exceptional cleverness to go from there to the trouble Khadgar has brought up for the company.

Lothar returns to the Gilded Rose every night. He goes home alone as many times.

Some nights, people talk to him. He uses them shamelessly to either practice his dialect or simply to pass the time. There is an old man who wants to know about Earth, and two youngsters who hang onto his every word when he talks about the old continents and the distribution of political power in his own time. The two are only more interested in trying to coax him into bed to see if that is where the two eras differ, too.

Lothar's home is empty every morning he returns, except for one day when it is not.

The military official can be identified by his rigid stance and his white uniform, which must be impossible not to stain and is yet always impeccable, before he offers Lothar a hand and introduces himself.

The Atrophic Space Program department of Intelligence, he says, would like to know when Lothar has last seen the program they call Khadgar. It would also like to know if he knows where it currently is.

Though they refer to Khadgar as an object and in turn deserve less than half of Lothar's cooperation, Lothar can't be bothered. Their presence means that the program does have him. Khadgar is not being contained somewhere. He is not forced to go through another correction program to clean up unwanted anomalies in his human markup, and he is not being held in the terminal. Also, any trackers they may have placed on what they deem their property, Khadgar must have disabled. Their expensive program has run away from them.

Lothar casually tells the man that he doesn't know.

He sleeps better that night, and makes for Goldshire in the morning.

* * *

“Your name and identification,” drones the clerk at the Lion's Pride Inn.

“Anduin Lothar,” Lothar returns in equal monotony. He slides his ID card across the desk and waits for his unannounced arrival to be processed. They will give him the worst room—not planning ahead is frowned upon in any hotel on Geneva, Lothar has come to find out—and he will only sleep a quick nap to get the lethargy of travel out of his system. They are all trivial details. He is not here for the room, or the sleep. Simply put, it is the corner in the common room that has drawn him.

The inn's decor is old, themed to look like it comes from a time before Lothar existed. It is all quite awfully fake. The keycard blips a green LED light, which is not as bad as the hiss when the door unlocks and the hearth fire inside flickers on in interlace.

Two beds, curiously.

And Khadgar sits on the one closest the wall.

His legs are pulled against his chest, and he chews on the nail of his thumb. When his big eyes meet Lothar's, he stills. His chest rises and falls, and his eyes are curiously aglow. He looks—Lothar's joy is shortlived—he looks uncertain.

Lothar drops his suitcase and moves to the bed. He is not stupid enough to sit on it. “Are you okay?” he asks. How badly he wants to pull the man close and confirm to himself that Khadgar is not another hologram in a room full of facades.

They have not seen each other for too long, and they are not the same as when last they met. “Did they hurt you?”

Khadgar blinks, and his light falters. “What?” he asks, confused. “What do you mean?”

“The ASP?”

“The ASP didn't do anything.” Distracted, Khadgar eases up. When Lothar makes to move forward, Khadgar reclines regardless, and so they stay where they are. “I missed you.”

Lothar tries a small smile. He is sure he radiates when it is reciprocated. “I missed you too.” At that point, he reaches for a pillow from the free bed behind him and lies down flat on the floor. For Khadgar to see him is to strain himself, and he isn't supposed to. They have talked without sight for the larger part of a year. This feels familiar. “Talk to me?” he asks.

“I left.”

“I figured. One of your nannies came to ask me if I had snatched you away. Officer Watson, I think he called himself?”

“Officer Watson,” huffs Khadgar. “If it were up to Officer Watson, I'd be on hormone suppressants and hooked up into a tube somewhere. Tell me you were rude to him.”

Lothar should have done more than the polite send-off. “Is that why you went away?”

“No.”

“It should be.”

Khadgar licks his lips—although Lothar knows how it sounds, it unbalances him to his core when the source is only half a bed away. “I am my own,” he starts. By his trepidation, it must be the first time he admits it to himself. “I want to live. I want to laugh, and I think that every now and then, I also want to cry. I want to be in love. I want it returned. I want so much, Lothar, and I am afraid that none of that is going to happen. But I want to have at least tried.”

Lothar's lips are dry. He prays to whatever religion an interstellar soldier who has seen the edge of reality may still believe in, and says, “Then try.”

* * *

When he says _try_ , he doesn't mean _this_.

Stroboscope light flashes around them, while Lothar tries to keep up with his friend in a throng of neon pink coloured people. Khadgar's eyes are bright with energy, the way they are when he is especially excited, but his movements are sloppy, courtesy of the drug that some stranger sold him and promised would make him feel very good. Khadgar had pushed the pill past his lips before Lothar had known it was being offered.

His enhanced immune system may slow the substance part of the way, but it does nothing for Khadgar's inhibitions.

His shirt hangs open. Khadgar does not care. He smiles all the time.

It is impossible to keep track of him. When Lothar stumbles across him again, a man with pink hair and a septum has his hand on Khadgar's cheek and looks at him like he is a one-way ticket to heaven. Khadgar dips his head and laughs. He has no clue how strongly he is flirting with the stranger, but at least as soon as he catches sight of Lothar, Khadgar's attention is only on him. The stranger is promptly forgotten. Khadgar parts his lips. He laughs. Then is he gone again.

He drinks and he learns to smoke. His pupils are continually bigger when Lothar finds him next, and Khadgar himself further inebriated. His hands rest on Lothar's hip when Lothar leans in to shout something against his ear.

He pukes in the alley. His headache in the morning is phenomenal.

And Lothar takes it all in stride.

The space between them becomes burning ground, Khadgar the fire that almost burns too brightly now. Lothar turns away from him in his bed to make sure that the man does not see how it frays him. It is a matter of time before someone tries to claim him, the way Khadgar flirts without knowing that he does, and Lothar has no idea how he would go about that when it happens.

“You didn't like last night,” Khadgar murmurs curiously around a mouthful of bacon and egg at breakfast.

“No,” says Lothar, because he sees no point in lying.

The concise response confuses Khadgar. He prods at his egg. “People like going out, don't they?”

Lothar prefers late night discussions about ethics and careful flirtations with a human AI. The smile doesn't reach his eyes. “You've got a lot to learn.”

That evening, he goes down to the inn for a drink on his own. He expects Khadgar to go out on his own—the man has been talking of nothing else since his headache abated. Lothat will not stop him if he goes, as it is Khadgar's life to live. But he does not want to think about all the things that can go wrong.

Upon his return, the young man is instead asleep in Lothar's bed.

He has not the heart to move him.

* * *

Khadgar's bed dips.

Lothar opens his eyes, and closes them again. Having taken up the free bed when his own was occupied, somehow Khadgar must have woken and decided that he made a mistake. And so now, they haven't got a lot of space.

“Did I wake you?”

It's hard to tell the time from what light filters into the room through the curtains. So how long Lothar has been lost in his thoughts, he doesn't know. “No, you didn't.” There is something between them of a complexity that is staggering. A wrong move and their carefully built relationship crashes down.

“Being human is confusing,” says the man.

And Lothar reckons that it is. “Tell me,” he says. “Not about ethics or biology. Tell me how you feel. Be honest.”

Khadgar breathes in and out. His pattern is irregular at first, almost fearful, but soon it soothes out. Impossibly only a program. When he speaks, his voice is lyrical, bordering on poetic. “I drank and I had fun, but it made me want to throw up.”

“That's normal.”

The man turns. Lothar feels his eyes on him. “Is it?”

“Perfectly,” he hums. “Happens to most of us.”

“Then why do people do it?”

Lothar shrugs. He has had many drinking sessions in his time, and more often than not they have been alone. “Why do we do a lot of things? Because it makes us feel good first. You will get the hang of it,” he promises. If he can travel light years away from Earth and find himself in love with a man born in a laboratory among the stars, anything is possible. “There are many things you won't learn from books. There is no manual for being human. Some things you'll just have to learn by messing them up.”

Khadgar's eyes are wet when Lothar looks at him. The glossy reflection draws him in. As only a friend, it is not Lothar's place to admire it. He can't help that he does. When Khadgar's lips move, Lother almost reaches out to touch them. “I don't want to mess things up.”

Honesty is a frightening thing. “Doing nothing because you're afraid to fail can be worse.”

“And you? Is there something you're afraid of?”

Lothar rolls his eyes and inclines his head. It should not be so difficult for Khadgar to figure it out. All the same, he will not pronounce it. His affections are fragile enough as they are. “Will you let me take you on that gryphon ride?”

Khadgar shakes his head.

“No?”

“You're not afraid of that,” whispers Khadgar. His eyes flick down, minutely, so short that Lothar wound have missed it on a blink. Then he leans forward.

Lothar wants to pull back. He also wants to be selfish. “What are you doing?”

The dark lashes flutter shut. Softly, so very softly, Khadgar presses his lips against Lothar's.

There is a delicacy that is new. Lothar has imagined kissing him many times. In his mind, this has always been either clumsy or instinctive. Even clinical, with a couple of scientific analyses to help Khadgar go about the best way to do this. In reality, Khadgar curves forward lightly. He is flesh and blood, warmth and generosity. Lothar doesn't want to be the first in a line of many, and he fears how little it might mean to Khadgar as soon as he understands how much more others can offer him. All the same, Lothar wants this. He wants _him_. He forgets to breathe when he responds.

It is sweet and lovely. In the same breath, it is absolution. Khadgar does not move from where he lies, content as he is to revel in the otherworldliness of having one's mouth against an other. Lothar feels him smile, then suck in a breath when Lothar chances to graze his teeth along his lower lip. He enjoys that response best. “Like that?”

The space ceases to exist. “Kind of.”

“Kind of?” chuckles Lothar. “You wound me.”

“You're holding back.”

Khadgar has caught on. In a bed in a fake room with a projected hearth and a charm beyond how poorly integrated the holographic fire is, Lothar is terrified of scaring him away. Had Khadgar been a normal man, raised a normal way, Lothar might well have climbed atop him and divested him of at least something, were he not too rusty for it. “I don't want to push you,” he says with his eyes still on Khadgar's lips.

“I want you to push me,” Khadgar says back in earnest. He knows what he is doing when he wets his lips. The challenge is clear. “I trust you.”

But only so much self-control can hold Lothar back, and it snaps. From one moment to the next, he has the man pinned under him. They can't look away. Neither of them pretends to be unaffected. “Come away with me.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere they can't find you.”

Khadgar smirks. It looks deadly good on him. “The ASP will always be able to find me. Just, they won't be able to do anything about that. I researched the laws. They have no legal means of holding me. They would have to deal with an ethics board, and they can't afford that kind of publicity.” He pulls Lothar in and puts his lips on him again. “Push me.”

And Lothar nearly growls.

He gives, then. As much as he thinks is safe to give. He won't undress Khadgar, not so much as a button, but he gives until their tongues dance. Until Khadgar is panting. Until the man knows quite how good it can feel to have kisses scattered across his neck, their friction a promise for later.

Lothar is in love. The declaration itself may be reserved for a later time, when he is a bit more composed. But he does not kid himself; there is no chance that the way in which Khadgar looks at him is anything less. Centuries after he has left his home planet for a threatening war, losing a wife and a son to time, Anduin Lothar finds himself in love again with a creature of the future.

Advanced Genetic Intelligence, Khadgar would correct him.

So, Advanced Genetic Intelligence.

When they first met, they had to wait for a response for hours. Khadgar called him Commander, and to him Lothar was the only man to see both the beginning and the end of the war. A class of his own. Lothar's name for Khadgar was Computer, and Khadgar was a voice in the box. Little more than a concept.

Lothar kisses him until they are both breathless.

Their story does not end here.

And the labels already no longer apply.

**Author's Note:**

> Credit where credit is due!
> 
> 'Ex Machina', a movie exploring the concept of when a machine is no longer a machine, and 'Interstellar', about relativity in space and time, have inspired me greatly. Add to the mix some of Joe Haldeman's view on the future of humanity in his book 'The Forever War'. This story would have been very different if not for their points of view.
> 
> And a bit more extra credit: to you! Thanks for reading! You rock <3


End file.
